by Marion Meade
During that year, plague raged in England “so that on most days seven or eight bodies of the dead were carried out of every church for burial and immediately after this deadly mortality a dreadful famine ensued.” The winter was so severe that snow and ice covered England from Christmas to Candlemas. How tempted Eleanor must have been by the prospect of returning to the southern abbey where she had always felt an unearthly serenity. And in the end, how vehemently she rejected the offer, even, it is said, appealing for aid to the archbishop of Rouen, who, despite his admonitions in 1173, apparently agreed that she had no vocation for the religious life. One can only surmise from this incident that she had not given up hope of eventual release, even though there seemed to be little foundation for such a hope. In truth, she was as much cloistered at Salisbury as she would have been in a cell at Fontevrault.
In the summer of 1176, her daughter Joanna came to Winchester prior to her departure for Sicily, where she was to marry King William. Entries in the pipe rolls suggest that Eleanor was temporarily released from Salisbury, probably at Joanna’s intercession, to spend these last days in England with her daughter and that, moreover, she accompanied Joanna to Southampton. This was the first time that she had seen any of her children in two years. Perhaps due to Joanna’s indignation about her mother’s confinement, after Eleanor returned to Salisbury in the fall, her standard of living gradually began to improve. “For 2 cloaks of scarlet and 2 capes of scarlet and 2 grey furs and 1 embroidered coverlet for the use of the Queen and her servant girl, 28£, 13s. 7d., by the King’s writ.”
While time seemed to stand still for her, life surged on for those at liberty to order their existences as best they could. In 1177, the chroniclers duly reported the doings of Queen Marguerite, who, “being pregnant, went’ to Paris and was delivered of a stillborn son.” And equally momentous events found their way into the records. “In this same year,” noted Hovedon, “on the thirteenth day before the calends of July, it rained a shower of blood for two whole hours in the Isle of Wight, so much so that linen clothes which were hung out upon the hedges were stained just as though they had been dipped in blood.” But of Queen Eleanor there is not so much as a single line. To her contemporaries, it was as if she were dead.
In the end, it was not Henry’s queen who entered a nunnery but his mistress, Rosamond Clifford, with whom he had consoled himself in recent years. After Rosamond died at Godstow, about 1176, Henry took other women into his bed, one of whom must have filled Eleanor with more rage than she had ever felt for the Rose of the World. Alais Capet, the princess who had been promised to Richard at Montmirail and who had been reared in Eleanor’s court, was sixteen in 1176. Although she was certainly of a marriageable age, Henry appeared to have forgotten her betrothal to his son, and after the court at Poitiers had been shuttered, she had been brought to England, where, rumor said, she had become the king’s mistress. Gerald of Wales, an annalist who virtually made a career of chronicling Henry’s vices, said that he consorted openly and shamelessly, first with Rosamond and then, after she had departed from the scene, with his son’s betrothed, whom he intended to make queen of England. So uninhibited was Henry in his relations with Alais that rumors circulated thickly. It was said that Henry planned to disinherit his three eldest sons and name as his heir the only child whose mind had not been poisoned by his mother, and that Alais’s hand would be conferred upon John Lackland. It was also said that, once he had divorced Eleanor, he would disinherit her ravenous eaglets and sire a new batch from his Capetian hostage. Despite the peace of Montlouis and his seeming affection for his sons, he was said to be disgusted with the lot of them. Had he not publicly declared to his bastard son. Geoffrey, “My other sons have proved themselves bastards but you alone are my true and legitimate son?” In any case, by 1177, the stories about the hapless Alais had become so rife that Louis Capet felt compelled to make inquiries, and receiving no satisfaction from Henry, appealed to Pope Alexander to enforce his daughter’s marriage to Richard.
At fifty-nine, Louis was beginning to feel the weight of his years. Wishing to put his affairs in order, he determined to have his son, Philip, now fourteen, anointed and crowned king of France. For the date of the coronation, he chose the feast of Our Lady’s Assumption, August 15, 1179, and summoned his vassals to assemble at Reims. Shortly before the appointed day, he and his son set out for Reims in a leisurely fashion, breaking their journey at Compiègne for rest and entertainment. Philip and his young friends eagerly went out to hunt in the forest, but the prince, chasing a boar, became separated and lost his way. Panicked, he spurred his horse this way and that, succeeding only in burying himself deeper in the woods. At dusk, after hours of shouting and weeping, he stumbled into a clearing where a charcoal burner made his home, a rude forest dweller who was no doubt more surprised to see a prince appear before his hovel door than Philip was to find him. Returned to his father, Dieu-Donné fell ill of a fever. Not only was it necessary to cancel the coronation, but the boy’s life was despaired of.
Beside himself with anxiety, Louis slept fitfully, and on three successive nights dreamed of Thomas Becket. Said the martyr, “Our Lord Jesus Christ has sent me so that you may know that if you believe and with a contrite heart go to His servant Thomas of Canterbury, the Martyr, your son will recover from his illness.” Although Louis’s barons warned him of the perils he risked by undertaking a pilgrimage in Plantagenet lands, nothing would shake his resolve. On Wednesday, August 22, “assuming now the name and dress of a pilgrim, he most devoutly visited England, which neither he nor any of his predecessors had ever visited.” Henry met him at Dover, and together the two kings traveled to the cathedral town, where Louis laid on the martyr’s tomb a cup brimming with gold. Four days later, he returned to France to find that Prince Philip had completely recovered. The coronation was rescheduled for All Saint’s Day, November 1, but “King Louis, laboring under old age and a paralytic malady, was unable to attend the coronation; for after he had returned from England and was staying at Saint-Denis, being struck by a sudden chill, he had an attack of paralysis and lost the use of the right side of his body.” On September 18, 1180, in his city of Paris, the most pious and Christian king of the Franks “laid aside the burden of the flesh and his spirit fled to the skies to enter upon its eternal reward with the elected princes.” In perhaps a more impartial obituary, William of Newburgh said, “He was a man of warm devotion to God and of great gentleness to his subjects and of notable reverence for the clergy, but he was rather more simple-minded than is becoming to a prince.”
Eleanor’s duplicity had affected Henry more than he cared to admit. He who could not tolerate having his will flouted or his trust abused had been forced to contend with two major betrayals, and as a result, he had developed an exaggerated suspicion of everyone’s motives. There occurred an almost complete metamorphosis of personality, from the affable, forthright young man whom Eleanor had married to a suspicious, middle-aged tyrant replete with persecution complex, and still later to a dissembler whose promises and oaths were deemed worthless. His imprisonment of Eleanor may have solved one of his personal problems, but four even more agonizing ones remained—his sons who constantly harried him “until he could find no abiding state of happiness or enjoyment of security.” When the rebellion had ended in 1174, Henry promptly resolved to straighten out the Young King, only to find that he had fled in terror to Paris lest he, too, suffer the same fate as his mother. It was not until the spring of 1175 that he came to his father at Bures and fell flat on the ground begging him with tears to receive his homage and allegiance. Finally, promised a larger allowance and assured repeatedly of his father’s love, he agreed to return to England with the king. Ralph of Diceto described the remarkable amity between father and son at this period by saying that “every day at the stated hour for meals they ate at the same table” and at night slept in the same chamber. In his father’s company, he made a progress around the island for the express purpose of learning to adm
inister the kingdom that had the most ordered government in the world; he attended synods and council meetings, received foreign embassies, and destroyed illegal castles. But Henry’s tutoring was lost on the youth, who found the routine of assizes and exchequers irksome. Indolent by temperament, he longed for tournaments and the company of those gallants whose freewheeling existence revolved about tourneying, drinking, and boasting. His father’s insistence that he remain in England and the continual surveillance under which he lived suggest a state imprisonment little freer than his mother’s imprisonment at Salisbury. Determined to escape at all cost, he requested permission to make a Lenten pilgrimage to Saint James of Compostela, a ruse that his father saw through immediately. Henry understood all too well that the boy fevered to join his profligate friends on the Continent, and it is a measure of his strong will that he succeeded in detaining the Young King for an entire year. Finally, able to hold him no longer, he gave permission for his son and Marguerite to visit Paris, with the stipulation that after they had paid their respects to Louis, the Young King should travel on to Aquitaine and give Richard a hand in his continuing struggles with the southern barons. In that way, Henry meant to give him useful work, and he further attempted to limit his carousing by allotting him only a modest allowance and assigning one of his trusted men, Adam of Churchdown, to travel with the youth as a “chancellor.”
Upon the Young King’s arrival in the Île-de-France in 1176, he immediately justified the king’s worst fears. Seeking out young men with similar tastes, those very gallants whom Henry had dismissed as undesirables, he spent the summer traveling from tournament to tournament and even persuaded his cousin the count of Flanders to outfit him with arms and horses so that he might tourney in a style appropriate to a king. In the autumn, however, with the end of the tournament season, the Young King slumped again into depression. Having nothing better to do, he drifted into Aquitaine to give Richard the promised aid, but it is clear that he did so with the greatest reluctance. Why should he help Richard to settle the affairs of his duchy when he himself had nothing he could call his own? The most that can be said for him was that he put in a brief appearance at Angoulême, where Richard was conducting a campaign, and then almost immediately departed for Poitiers, where he rallied his old friends from his mother’s court, many of them knights who had sided with him during the rebellion. In the southland, the kingdom of England seemed very far away indeed, and people talked candidly of subjects that were only mentioned in whispers elsewhere. The Young King’s grievances against his father were sympathetically supported, and he found himself an object of great solicitude, if not an actual hero. To Adam of Churchdown, the conversations that he overheard among these chevaliers sounded suspiciously treasonous, perhaps the beginning of a second rebellion, and he dutifully wrote a warning to King Henry. His letters, however, were intercepted by the Young King, who ordered Adam’s hands tied behind his back and the man to be whipped naked through the streets of Poitiers.
For some time the sporting life managed to absorb the Young King’s energies. “Henry the young king,” wrote a chronicler, “spent three years in tournaments and profuse expenditure. Laying aside his royal dignity and assuming the character of a knight, he devoted himself to equestrian exercises and carrying the victory in various encounters, spreading his fame on all side around him.” But in the end, no amount of fame nor diversion could ease his cankerous discontent, nor was his temper improved when he thought of his brother Richard, whose constant warfare to keep his duchy in check left him no time for mock battles. At eighteen, Eleanor’s heir proved a marked contrast to young Henry’s frivolity. He had set about stamping out rebellion in Aquitaine with a grim earnestness that soon won him the hatred of his mother’s vassals and, perhaps, the secret respect of his father. In 1176, he humbled the most persistent troublemakers, taking Limoges and Château-neuf-sur-Charente in the process, and in the following year, with the northern sector of Aquitaine quiet, he marched his army into the south, where he forced the Basques and Navarrese to recognize his authority. In 1179, he captured Geoffrey de Rancon’s supposedly impregnable fortress of Taillebourg and then, to the horror of the local citizenry, leveled it to the ground. Before he was twenty, Richard had already established a reputation as the most gifted military tactician in western Europe, a reputation which only fanned his older brother’s jealousy.
The contrast between the mock king of England and the conquering hero of Aquitaine was not lost on either young Henry or on his contemporaries in the south. The troubadour Bertran de Born was probably reflecting popular opinion when, in a taunting sirventès, he termed the prince “lord of little land,” and the Young King’s position grew even more intolerable after 1177, when Henry crowned eleven-year-old John Lackland as king of Ireland.
By the end of 1182, Henry had grown desperate. His every attempt to appease his twenty-seven-year-old son had failed, including promises of a more generous allowance, and he was forced to admit that he had lost control of the situation. Frantically casting about for some means of humoring his heir, without, of course, giving him authority or land, he determined to hold a particularly sumptuous Christmas court of the sort that might appeal to a young man who doted on splendid banquets. Choosing the city of Caen as the gathering place, he forbid all local baronial courts in his provinces and invited noblemen and prelates to renew their homage at what the chroniclers would call the most splendid court ever held in Normandy. A crowd of over one thousand arrived to keep the cheer with their overlord that year: Geoffrey with his testy Breton barons; Richard trailing the vassals and troubadours of the absent queen; Matilda and Henry of Saxony, exiled from Germany by the Holy Roman emperor, along with their children and an enormous household; Queen Marguerite, haughty, beautiful, barely on speaking terms with her husband because of his unfounded jealousy of William Marshal, who, he believed, had dared to love his wife. The Young King arrived at Caen in a sullen humor and immediately made himself unpleasant to everyone. For all Henry’s elaborate preparations, the young man ignored the tables groaning with good wines and game and fowl and, throwing venomous glances at Richard, began his usual plaints. Richard, he declared, had erected a castle along the frontier between Poitou and Anjou—but he had had the impudence to build his fortress on the wrong side of the border. His brother, young Henry demanded, must give up this stronghold, which clearly lay outside of his patrimony.
When Henry failed to show any particular concern over Richard’s lone castle, the Young King flew into a temper, renewing his ceaseless pleas for power to match his titles. Beset by devouring jealousies, he was reduced to threats and ultimatums: Unless his father met his demands immediately, he would renounce those absurd empty titles: he would take the cross and go to Jerusalem, never to return; he would, he vowed in a burst of angry tears, take his own life.
Henry demonstrated a remarkable capacity for self-deception when it came to his eldest son. No matter how outrageous the youth’s attempts at blackmail, he viewed him with a merciful eye, and on this occasion, to mollify his distraught son, he called together all three of his boys and asked Richard and Geoffrey to do homage to their older brother for their lands. While Geoffrey expressed willingness, Richard utterly refused even to consider the suggestion, saying that he held Aquitaine, not from his father, but as a gift from his mother. Not only had he been crowned duke with Eleanor’s consent, but three years earlier, she had succumbed to Henry’s pressure and ceded him the duchy; furthermore, he had already done homage for it to the king of France, the lawful overlord of the dukes of Aquitaine. Shaking with cold fury, he went on to bluntly inform his father what he thought of his mother’s imprisonment. As for his older brother, if he wanted land, let him go out and fight for it. With that, Richard turned on his heel and strode out, “leaving nothing behind save threats and defiance.” It is impossible to say which enraged Henry more, his son’s defiance or his bringing up the subject of the queen, but in a passion, he turned to the Young King and gave him permi
ssion to “curb Richard’s pride.”
Young Henry, accompanied by Geoffrey, rode into Poitou in early 1183, where he ostentatiously joined those very discontented barons whom Richard had been fighting for the past eight years. Within a few weeks, it was plain to Henry that he had made a serious mistake; the rivalry between his sons had somehow escalated into a full-scale revolt, which now included Philip Augustus, the duke of Burgundy, and the count of Toulouse. Quick to perceive that unless he rescued Richard, Aquitaine would be lost, Henry himself went to Limoges in February to reason with his heir. Arriving before the walls of the city, he was greeted by a shower of arrows, one of them, to his horror, piercing his cloak. That evening young Henry paid a call on his father to explain that the arrow had been an accident, the random shot of a trigger-happy burgher. Nevertheless, nothing about the young man’s manner inspired Henry’s confidence. Dressed in his coat of mail, he refused either to lay aside his arms or to sit down and dine with his father. Eager to be off, he swore that he would persuade the rebel barons to submit to the king, and if he could not, he would leave them to their own devices and rejoin his father. Once back in Limoges, however, he urged the rebels to begin fortifying their city against the king’s attack. When Henry saw them . furiously digging moats and tearing down churches for stones to feed their catapults, he wearily rode up to the city walls a second time to plead with young Henry and Geoffrey. Once again he was greeted with arrows, this time very nearly taking his life; only the sudden rearing of his horse caught the arrow that would have pierced his chest. After this ominous incident, the Young King again came to Henry’s tent with apologies and assurances of his fidelity, this time, as if to dispel suspicion, giving Henry his armor and remaining for several days. While he was keeping the old king occupied, however, Geoffrey, was leading a band of mercenaries on a plundering expedition in the neighborhood, looting monasteries and stealing altar vessels.
